Tell me, oh camera gurus.

First of all, check this out, I think these pics are awesome:

http://icon1000.com/culture/gallery/

Now, on most of them, I would say they have a sort of lowered-brightness, upped-contrast effect. Is that correct? I really like the pics and would like to replicate the feel, but want to know how you guys would go about doing it.

Hopefully you understand what I mean. For example, what camera configurations and photoshopping would you do to make a pic come out like this:

http://icon1000.com.s3.amazonaws.com...2/02/NMH17.jpg

Thanks in advance!

What you need is an Iphone & an App called Instagram.


I know this isn't the best example but this is what it can do at a basic level. & the original picture was probbably better but I've just used this as an example, the photos with the Icon they would have got as much exposure as possible to create the sunlight over the objects.

Thanks, but sadly I'm not going to ever get an iPhone, and even if I had to, I probably wouldn't take pics on in worth saving.

And way to do this on photoshop or GIMP?

Photoshop you should be able to do alot more, it's just a case of messing around with different tools, I haven't used Photoshop for a couple years now.

Instagram is mainly for photos to be shared while on the go, with minimal editing available. Unlike Photoshop.

[keith_d]

The exaggerated perspective comes from using a wide angle lens close to the subject and pretty much wide open. The photographer was pretty much lying on the ground and has focussed on the right boot instead of the face.

I'm not an expert on post-processing, but looking at the gravel in the left corner I'd guess he's used sharpening to boost the edge contrast, then played with the curves dialog to alter the tonal range.

He's also lightened the face, which was quite heavily shaded. There's no sign of a reflector in the sunglasses, so I'm assuming that was done by computer too.

[anna]

What is it specifically you like about these photos?

The group that you have indicated have a bit of range to them, some black and white, ...others have a specific colour picked out of them, which you certainly can do in photoshop,(put a mask around that colour you wish to highlight and then make the unmasked area black and white in a separate layer).

As the knowledgable Keith_d has already stated all of the angles are taken from the ground up to give the subjects a sense of importance.

Most of the photos seem to be taken with a hard light source, most likely the sun and taken for the blacks to be just slightly underexposed and the highlights to be blown out.

So the first thing is not to worry about photoshop and the colour processing, but to take the photo in the same style and then put the "feel" of the photo on afterwards.

Most likely there is a photoshop plug in that has been applied to these photos to get the "film" look that is going on here. The contrast has been knocked out of the photos and the blues have been shifted slightly towards aqua. There will no doubt be a plug in that photoshop forums will be able to tell you more about then I can.

I found out that what I was looking for was how to synthetically cross-process using a photo editing program. Apologies for the poor description, I just couldn't and can't think of a way of describing it!